Language contact and prosodic change in Slavic and Baltic

Abstract

Thispaper discusses several Slavic and Baltic dialects which have undergone stressshifts as a result of language contact. Two types of change are discussed: 1)stress retractions from the final syllable onto the initial syllable of aprosodic word, and 2) the rise of fixed stress replacing earlier free stress.It is argued that in all cases discussed in the paper, contact with a languagewith fixed initial stress caused a stress shift. Examples from Croatian andLithuanian demonstrate that pitch contours played an important role in theseshifts. The results of the shifts are not always identical, but the underlyingmechanism is the same in each case presented in the paper: the lexical pitchcontour of the donor language was imposed on the target language, therebyintroducing constraints on the position of stress in the target language. It isargued that a similar mechanism operated in West Slavic, where languages withfree stress introduced fixed stress on the initial or penultimate syllable dueto contact with German and possibly Hungarian.